John Wilson on falling in love with Hollywood

On rainy Saturday afternoons as a child John Wilson used to watch reruns of MGM films and it was then that he fell in love with the sound world of the old Hollywood studio orchestras, which he thought “plush and expensive sounding”.

In 1994, while still in his 20s, he founded the John Wilson Orchestra, which specialises in recording contemporary film soundtracks and giving authentic performances of classic film scores.

Finding many of the MGM scores were destroyed long ago, Wilson has rewritten them himself, and many of these arrangements appear on his forthcoming album That’s Entertainment.

Lucy Coward spoke to John Wilson to find out about the album and the complex process of reconstructing film scores.